Even the rats are running
Bookworm on Dec 31 2008 at 6:48 pm | Filed under: Media matters
You know that NPR is hitting new lows when a liberal friend who reads only the MSM, who refers to anything that’s not MSM as “right wing rags,” and who prefaces his remark with “You know I don’t agree with everything Israel does,” then goes on to add that “NPRs coverage of the Gaza thing is appallingly biased.” Perhaps this friend will begin to figure out that this type of “appallingly biased” coverage isn’t anomalous, but is par for the course — and at tax payer expense too.
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6 Responses to “Even the rats are running”
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Somebody has to pay for propaganda. Might as well be the taxpayers. Freedom of the press to incite for totalitarian regimes and all that.
Do you know that all them “speaking truth to power” people try to defend the government funding of the BBC on the grounds that it makes them better and more trustworthy?
These are the same people talking up junk about Haliburton, Big Business, and Right Wing controlled media conglomerates, of course. They don’t see the contradictions because contradictions are the bread and butter of their intellectual existence, Book.
“Launching rockets over a border, to fall among your people, is an act of war against you and against your country”, is the simple argument that I would use, in every discussion.
“To launch those rockets is to declare war. A leadership that doesn’t respond in self-defense is a leadership that does not deserve to stay in power. Israel is obligated to respond, with all the response they deem necessary, and no other nation would do anything differently. You can be critical if you want to, but I can’t.”
And perhaps I’d leave it at that. Or I’d point out that Mexican drug lords occasionally murder Americans along the border and we make every attempt to bring them to justice. Should the drug lords ever let rockets fly into American cities along the border, I’d ask my political debater to consider our own response. I’d suggest they look at the Oklahoma City bombing, and then at 9-11, and ask them what appropriate responses would they have advocated? Let them then make fools of themselves in their pacifist responses.
It looks as though people are beginning to realize that the leaders of a nation are obligated to defend their people, and that the Israelis deserve this right too! The propaganda against the Israelis is becoming less effective. There is hope.
Ahhh…a ‘light bulb’ moment for the NPR viewer.
His observations are akin to post cataract surgery patient comments -
“wow, I see so clearly now, I didn’t realize how blurry my vision was”.
Sadly, I suspect this NPR fan will take a while to realize how much the wool is pulled over his eyes, but it’s a start.
Part of propaganda utilizes the saturation effect. Even if you don’t believe in the official line from a source and even if you believe it is full of lies and distortions, the simple fact that the official line gets repeated in such a consistent fashion (as the AP-New York Times-Reuters-MSNBC network achieves) influences the context upon which any individual looks at external reported events. The fact that so many people will repeat a lie already has changed your priorities and how you see other news.
This is why the art of propaganda is pervasive and not a brute force method. It can be utilized as such, but its more insidious uses often come from tackling problems at oblique angles. It is never, optimally, about convincing Man A that out Point B is correct. It is more like convincing him that he had an idea about Point C, from watching how we cover point B, that he thought was his own idea, but in reality it was our idea. Man A may believe he knows how he is being manipulated, but that would only make it a certainty for him to be manipulated once certain foreign thoughts were introduced and accepted by Man A as his own. Think of it as AIDs and as a virus. The immune system doesn’t recognize it as a threat because it has been taken over from the inside out.